August 23, 2011

Psychology professor Lisa Diamond says: “I’ve interviewed a lot of individuals about how invalidating it is when their own family members think they’re confused or going through a stage or in denial... These converging lines of evidence, using different methods and stimuli, give us the scientific confidence to say this is something real.”

26 comments:

WOW! I don't know to say about that. I can't imagine someone who is a self-proclaimed bisexual without imagining someone who is a little bit confused.Mebee I'm confused.Mebee you need to put DOWN the bong.

They think they are studying a new barrier-free frontier, when they are really documenting why the barriers evolved in the first place.

They pompously inform us of their studies of animals' roaming tendencies when all the fences are removed, but the ranch hand comes by and says that he already knew about the roaming tendencies, which is why he put up the fences in the first place.

I used to know a guy I worked a temp job with who got off on masturbating his pet cat with a Q-tip. I guess anything is possible. Catherine the Great was into horses, they say. Maybe there are some people who will get hot looking at vomit. They deserve to have a department of study I guess next to the department of cat masturbation. It's all so exciting.

This is controversial? And why are bisexuals any more confused than anyone else? Bisexuality is really pretty common, from my lifetime of anecdotal observation. I don't see why it would be more confusing than heterosexual or homosexual sex. Sexual attraction is confusing by design. Nature uses sex to confuse and confound creatures into procreating. Or trying to procreate. They get confused and sometimes practice their procreation techniques on people of the same sex. People, this is not a news flash. (Though apparently you can get grants to study it.

But when they use a PET scan,none of them respond to anything but male images.

Confirmation bias on the part of the observers? Were those studies replicated? Replicated by hostile observers looking to disprove the hypothesis? There were political reasons to enclose the "bisexuals", to fence them in with the rest of the gender coalition.

The notion that the great swarming herds of obviously bisexual men on the plains of perversity were self-deluded closet cases was always anecdotally ludicrous.

Hell, look at Titus and his fixation on tits, and I can't imagine someone more out-of-the-closet than him.

Nope. Reproducible and simple, large sample size, too. That's why the research was spiked. So were the studies that identified differences in how men and women think and especially how they respond to an emergency call for action (fight or fight). The latter had the unintended consequence of apparently identifying homosexuals, even those that were not currently identifying themselves as such. When the results of scientific research don't fit with the current memes that are being pushed, the funding disappears.

Both research studies (mapping of self-identified bisexuals and mapping of men and women's response to fight or flight clues) were proposed and carried out by female researchers with impeccable credentials who had been at the leading edge of brain-scanning technology and analysis. And their careers went in the toilet as a result of the PC "thought crime" purge.

The woman doing the work with bisexuals was active in PET scanner design and continued collecting data because she had unlimited access to the scanners. The last I recall, out of the thousands of men she had scanned, none responded to female images or the presence of live female. Women produced far different results. Roughly a third showed a response to women only, while two-thirds showed a response to male images and live males only. In follow-up interviews, many women in the larger group admitted that any sexual experiences they had with women were done to accommodate their male partner. Others admitted to being (living) with a female partner for other than sexual reasons (e.g. bad experiences with a male partner, monetary concerns such as room and board, etc.)

But do go by what people say rather than which areas of the brain light up involuntarily--every time the stimulus is presented. I have the feeling that you would be more comfortable with the "science" that way. And "bisexual" does sound so much more exotic, doesn't it?

I think most of us have a hard time accepting the existence of true bisexuals because most of us experience attraction almost exclusively to one sex. That, and what timmaguire42 said... most of the "bisexuals" I knew in college either turned out to actually be gay (the vast majority), or ended up straight and married (these claimed to be bi, but never really having any same-sex relationships... sometimes not even any same-sex sex). I don't know anybody who still claims to be bi.

Darrell, where are you getting this from? Do you have any links? Several CT scan studies have been posted comparing gay and straight brains with both sexes. Bisexuals have never been studied in PET research. At least if they have it's never been published.

I'm skeptical the posts you've made are genuinely factual.

The results from PET scans are not really strong enough to predict the sexual orientation of an individual's brain, because they show a range of structural differences between individuals that is greater than the average pooled difference of gay and straight brains.

fMRI studies confirmed bisexual arousal patterns in self-identified men and women. Look up 'bibrain'. The video shows an MRI cross section of a bisexual man achieving arousal to male/male and female/female stimuli.

It is absolutely ludicrous and unsupported to think that human beings are innately incapable of bisexuality.

@John - Most bisexual men settle down with women simply because they want kids. It's not that the attraction to men 'disappears', or that they were straight the whole time. They're just being practical, planning their lives.

Although some of them do end up settling with men--maybe about a 10th of all bisexuals. Increasingly, some have started making poly arrangements. As a bisexual polyamorous man, I generally prefer to date only other bisexuals (male or female). Haven't been able to relate to the gay guys I've met. You probably wouldn't meet a creature like me in any of your venues. My interests are too different.

I'm pretty much 50-50 in my attractions. That said, I envy you and Darrell in some ways. It is not always a fun place to be; the price for a strong attraction to both genders is a tendency for on-and-off gender dysphoria. Every bi guy I've met has this problem.